Devah Pager, 46, a Harvard sociologist best known for rigorously measuring and documenting racial discrimination in the labor market and in the criminal justice system, died Nov. 3 at her home in Cambridge, Mass.
Michael Shohl, her husband, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
In her seminal work, Pager, a professor of sociology at Harvard, documented what she called the "powerful effects of race" on hiring decisions, which she said contributed to persistent inequality. Employers, she found, were more likely to hire a white man, even if he had a felony conviction, than a black man with no criminal record.
"This suggests that being black in America today is essentially like having a felony conviction in terms of one's chances of finding employment," Pager said in a video interview with the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Her finding, which appeared first in her doctoral dissertation in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin, surprised many.
"I am a scholar of race relations," said William Julius Wilson, the Harvard sociologist and author of "The Declining Significance of Race," and "prior to Devah's research, I would not have predicted this finding."
Her research quickly found its way into the 2004 presidential campaign. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who was running for the Democratic nomination, often cited it, saying he was determined to combat the "institutional racism" it revealed.
With the recognition that ex-convicts were less likely to commit more crimes if they had a job, President George W. Bush created a program to help newly released prisoners re-enter the job market. White House aides said that Pager's study had helped shape the plan. Her research was remarkable enough for having such an immediate effect on public policy. It was all the more unusual for having originated as a dissertation; graduate students are not often able to undertake field experiments on such a scale. Her dissertation became a book, "Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration" (2007).
